


Our cake's dough on both sides

by Petra



Series: Love and rhetoric [3]
Category: Slings & Arrows
Genre: Baking, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-08-23
Updated: 2009-08-23
Packaged: 2019-09-21 07:09:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17039114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petra/pseuds/Petra
Summary: No one should ever ask Darren and Geoffrey to make dessert for a birthday party.





	Our cake's dough on both sides

**Author's Note:**

  * For [belmanoir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/belmanoir/gifts).



> For belmanoir, who inspired me, provided several good lines, and beta-read.

The first experiment in baking by Nichols & Tennant is a horrible failure. The inedible chocolate-clove-peanut butter-lemon cake is a venomous red where it is not burned to a black crisp. The whole thing ends up in the trash thanks to Geoffrey's inconvenient tendency to deal with criticism of his art by sulking attractively and Darren's inability to ignore him when he does so.

The fact remains that the resultant kissing and oral sex on the kitchen floor, under the fumes of the burned cake, is the most effectively they have worked together in years.

There is still a birthday upcoming that needs dessert, and someone--naming no names--promised that Geoffrey would be involved somehow in the creation of the food. Apparently the culpable party has never seen him near a kitchen. Darren gives up on the principle of cooperation and bakes sugar cookies when he's alone. Then he makes icing in a variety of shades and separates it into two sets of distribution mechanisms so they will have one less thing to fight about.

By the time Geoffrey arrives, the kitchen table is covered in various splodgy shapes, some of them cookie-cuttered inexpertly into people-ish shapes or what-have-you, and some more free-form.

"What the hell is this?" Geoffrey asks, holding up a particularly Dali-esque thing.

Darren points at the icing and smiles. "What you will."

"Rorschach cookies?"

"Call it a blank stage."

After they've both decorated a few, Geoffrey, never able to keep from criticizing for long, looks over at Darren's. "That's not even reasonably decent abstract art."

"It's Ophelia's fucking madness, darling. Go back to your--" Darren peers over "--Polonius fucking Gertrude."

"It's Othello and Desdemona. And I will. Thank you."

Some minutes later, Geoffrey finishes one and pushes it toward the middle of the table. "There."

Darren looks at it and chooses the most provocative interpretation. "It's a vulva."

"It is not!" Geoffrey tilts his head to one side. "...It wasn't supposed to be."

Darren raises his eyebrows and waits for Geoffrey to defend himself effectively. He expects it will be a long wait, but he has cookies. "Oh?"

"Side view of Caliban?" Geoffrey's description is too much like a question.

"No. Geoffrey, I am not a disciple of Freud. I find his theories to be at once insipid and deeply neurotic. But you almost convince me otherwise."

"Fine." Geoffrey pushes another one across the table. "Have at it."

Darren laughs until he has to take off his glasses to wipe his eyes. "The worst part is that I know you're trying--trying!--to make some sort of representational art with the sword motif, but your hand shook too much. And the red is fading entirely too much to pink."

"You know, Darren, if you see penises everywhere that's not because I have Freudian issues."

"It doesn't disprove my point, either." Darren picks up the green and adds accents to his cookie, hidden safely behind his arm.

"What are you working on, anyway?" Geoffrey asks.

"I'm not done yet."

Geoffrey rolls his eyes, and a tussle ensues, finishing in concerted kissing. After a few minutes, he takes advantage of Darren's coerced goodwill to look at the cookie. "God. A cloud being eaten by a vine?"

Darren sighs. "That's Titania on the right. And Bottom. It's a good thing you've never had the custody of a toddler; you'd ruin their sense of artistic achievement before they had the fine motor skills to hold a normal-sized crayon."

"It would never have occurred to me that you'd draw something that's actually in the canon." Geoffrey pushes the red toward him. "Titania's too green."

Darren pushes the red back. "My cookie, my vision."

Geoffrey rolls his eyes and adds more blue to his next cookie. "It's food. Not that anyone will want to eat something that grey."

"Food can be art. Do I have to tie you to a chair and make you watch Julia fucking Child?" Darren shakes his head. "You think this whole process is extraneous to the experience of consuming dessert."

"It is." Geoffrey turns his cookie sideways, frowns, and picks up another. "It's enjoyable, but it's not necessary."

Darren clucks his tongue. "You work in the field of presentation, and yet you do not understand it in its most fundamental and pleasing form. I despair of you, I really do."

"Mm. You can go stage nouvelle cuisine theater all you like." Geoffrey picks up the red, adds a few strokes and turns the two cookies towards Darren.

That's more like what he expects of Geoffrey, and far more pleasing. "On the other hand, there's something to be said for the direct approach. On occasion."

Geoffrey grins back. "So you do appreciate my art."

"When it involves blowjobs, yes. The boy on the right is Mercutio?" Darren turns the cookie slightly, adjusting the angle. "Hence the curls?"

"If you want to read it that way," Geoffrey says, and folds his arms.

Darren pushes his chair back. "You'd rather fuck than make art? Really?"

Geoffrey rolls his eyes. "They're cookies, for God's sake."

"Just for that, I ought to turn you down until we've finished them and you understand the unifying theories behind my output." Darren glares at him. "But they'll keep until later. Help me put the frosting away, young Montague, and we'll put your phallus fixation to good use."  


*

Ellen's birthday party is rife with people going "What the hell is that?" and "Man, that is way more about Geoffrey and Darren's sex life than I ever wanted to know."

After a few minutes, Ellen drags Geoffrey into a corner and holds up a cookie. "I can't eat that, sorry."

"Ellen," Geoffrey says in her ear, "it's only a metaphorical penis. You don't have that much trouble with the real one."

"It's Darren's metaphorical penis." She waves it at him.

"Actually, that one's mine."

Ellen looks at it. "Somehow that doesn't make it any more appetizing."

Geoffrey sniffs. "I'll be offended by that later, after I tell you about the cookie-creation process. If it doesn't change your mind."

"Geoff, there's a party going on."

"So I walk in, and Darren has the whole place covered..."


End file.
